The maths of animation

There’s no getting around it, if you want to make things move nicely you gotta face up to your fear of maths. But when it comes down to it there isn’t actually that much you need to know. And thankfully Mozilla evangelist Christian Heilmann has written a fantastic article on Smashing Magazine which is a great foundation in some techniques that you really need.

There is a lot of math in the visual things we do, even if we don’t realize it. If you want to make something look natural and move naturally, you need to add a bit of physics and rounding to it. Nature doesn’t work in right angles or linear acceleration. This is why zombies in movies are so creepy.

I’m not sure I get the zombie reference but as we all know, references to pirates, ninjas or zombies make anything at least 34% more interesting. And you can’t argue with that maths.

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About Seb Lee-Delisle

Seb (@seb_ly) is an internationally recognised creative coder specialising in creative coding techniques across a wide variety of programming languages and platforms. He loves sharing and teaching physics, motion detection, 3D and particle systems. A highly sought-after speaker, his recent CreativeJS workshop series sold out within hours. He co-hosts the Creative Coding Podcast.

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